The development of recombinant DNA technology in the early 1970s led to a public debate over the risks and rewards of this new technique that lasted nearly a decade. The phrase “the public” was used over and over again in the course of this discussion. Critics of recombinant DNA experiments repeatedly accused scientists of endangering the public through hubris or negligence; scientists spoke of public hostility, public incomprehension, the need to educate the public; members of the press spoke of a duty to keep the public informed. But who was this public? For example, if scientists had created and then released some form of dangerously modified E. coli — a scenario that many critics feared, since E. coli was a common experimental organism as well as an inhabitant of the human intestine — presumably they also would have been among the ‘public’ at risk for infection. As scientific laypeople, most journalists did not have the level of expertise of professional scientists, placing them among the public they were supposed to inform. “The public,” in other words, was both the center point of the entire conversation and a term that was difficult to pin down precisely.1
This makes the idea of a “public discussion” trickier than it seems on the surface. Scientists at the time were aware of this. In 1978, for example, molecular biologist Norton Zinder participated in a panel discussion on “The Implications of Cloning” at the annual meeting of the American Bar Association. In a letter to a correspondent at the ABA, Zinder commented that while it was “relatively easy to find the relevant scientific community” for a given issue,
it is still unclear to me how one identifies the relevant public(s). Even were the groups to be identified, under what auspices, with what charge, and with what authority do they negotiate?…I’ve read and heard again and again, science must renegotiate its contract with the public, scientists must be accountable to the public, scientists must be more open with the public, etc. etc. I’m sure we’d do it if only we know who sits at the other side of the table.2
In this letter to Stromberg, Zinder brought up legislatures as a potential representative of the public, but noted that legislatures were there to legislate, not to analyze and discuss. The idea that legislatures might stand in for the public was also discussed during Zinder’s conversation with Daniel Callahan of the Hastings Center in the July-August 1987 issue of Politics Today. Here Zinder reiterated his question about the public in different words: “Who is our public? There were 10 people at [the] Asilomar [conference on recombinant DNA] who represented government agencies. Are they the public? Sixteen reporters were there. Are they the public? Four lawyers. Twenty percent of that conference was outsiders. Who is our public?”3
Zinder’s comments conflate several different conceptions of “scientists and the public” that are worth pulling apart. There is “our public” versus “the public,” that is, the difference between a narrower collection of laypeople who form the audience for communication on specific scientific topic (“our public”) and “the public,” or everyone in general. Was there more than one public, as Zinder’s comment about “the relevant public(s)” in his letter to Stromberg suggested? Were those who were uninterested in or unaware of the issue and yet potentially affected by it also part of the public? Finally, there is the question of representation, which is bound up in the question of how you locate and talk to the public. In a democratic republic like the United States, legislatures are assumed to represent the public, although their representation excludes those who are not eligible to vote — and people in this category, e.g. who do not have American citizenship or who are under eighteen, certainly form part of the public. In addition, a legislature represents a public for a specific purpose — legislation — and this is not the only end which requires the public to constitute itself in a form conducive to conversation or debate. Do those representing the public have to be selected by the public itself, or can they be appointees, as in the case of representatives of federal agencies, or self-appointed, as in the case of the press? If you organize a public meeting to discuss a scientific issue of public interest, as happened in many cities in the 1970s in response to fears of the risks of recombinant DNA research, how do you make sure that you are reaching everyone you want to reach?
The theoretical and logistical questions wrapped up in the idea of “scientists communicating with the public” have been explored by numerous scholars in the context of the recombinant DNA controversy in the 1970s. The 1975 Asilomar conference, in particular, has been a focus of debate. At this conference, a small group of scientists got together to discuss the risks of recombinant DNA research and how to manage them. Their goal was to draw up a set of guidelines for further research in this area. The sense of urgency behind this was partly because of genuine concerns about safety in and outside of the lab, but also partly because many scientists feared that if they did not commit themselves to some formal limitations on this research, the federal government would step in and create guidelines without their input which would be more draconian and thus limit their freedom to work. There were some journalists present at the meeting, but their numbers were limited and they were not granted access to every discussion. Members of the public did not participate in the scientists’ discussions.
The attendees at the conference succeeded in drawing up guidelines for recombinant DNA research that formed the basis for later regulations issued by the NIH, and in this sense the conference was a success. More than this, though, Asilomar was and has remained significant for the way in which it has been remembered as a success story for science and scientists. In this version of Asilomar, the conference was a model of scientific engagement with matters of concern to the public and of scientific self-control and restraint — the image is of scientists responsibly limiting potentially dangerous research. Terms like “caution” and “self-control” were used repeatedly in descriptions of the conference.4 It has frequently been cited as a model for dealing with the potential risks of new scientific developments.5
But this is not the only way, or even the most accurate way, to look back on the Asilomar conference. In particular, the absence of meaningful public participation in the discussions at that conference has been the object of criticism. The public was essentially excluded from the discussion. Scholars’ criticisms of Asilomar have centered on how scientists framed the debate about recombinant DNA there and elsewhere, and the type of public that this framing assumed — one that was relatively passive, and one whose ethical or safety concerns were not always taken seriously.
The criticism of Asilomar that is most often repeated by science and technology scholars, historians, journalists and others, is that its organizers focused too narrowly on technical questions and that the risks they were interested in assessing were the concrete risks related to containing genetically modified organisms in the lab. There were good reasons to narrow the scope of the discussion in this way, at least from the point of view of the participating scientists. Had they launched into a more widely ranging discussion that included ethical questions, they might never have achieved consensus on the basic laboratory safety protocols that they wanted to draw up.6
But this is, in a sense, part of the problem. When certain issues or questions are organized into, or out of, a discussion, a political decision, in the sense of a decision about power, has been made.7 When the organizers of Asilomar set the conference up in such a way as to limit the participation of the general public, they were making an argument not only about who was qualified to determine risks, but also what types of risks were important and which were irrelevant or undeterminable. Moreover, the assumption that recombinant DNA research would in fact go forward was built into the discussion — whether such research ought to be carried out was implicitly assumed to be up to scientists themselves. In the case of Asilomar and in general, this mode of thinking lends support to the idea that there are real, hard-headed and objective assessments of risks on the one hand, and on the other hand, “softer,” ethical or social objections which are more subjective and less substantial — “perceived” risks as opposed to “real” risks. Describing public criticism of science in this way is in some sense an argument that the public isn’t really qualified to assess the risks of new methods or technologies, and it disguises the fact that what these “softer” objections might be articulating is in fact a rejection of researchers’ claims to be able to predict all the relevant risks.8
Ultimately, some STS scholars have argued that the Asilomar conference helped to create and sustain a particular version of “the public,” one in which the public and its institutions, including the law, were passive and scientists were those who determined what types of risks were reasonable to worry about and when it was time to discuss or pass legislation regulating the potential uses and risks of new research or technology. This view of the public and its ability (or not) to determine when concern was justified also had the effect of pushing social, moral and ethical concerns out of the category of what was debatable or governable.9
This essay will address the question of how scientists located the public(s) relevant to them during the debate in the 70s and early 80s over recombinant DNA and genetic engineering, and what the points of contact between “science” and “the public” were. J. Benjamin Hurlbut’s contention that one of the legacies of Asilomar was to assign both the public and the law a passive role in the debate — as opposed to scientists, who were those who decided when it was time to be concerned — is relevant here because it points to the question of the relationship between legislative bodies and the public in debates about science policy. Do representative bodies represent the public in this case? Are they were they public is to be found? In addition, the persistent criticism that the Asilomar conference was problematic because it limited what was up for debate is relevant here because this, too, is related to the question of and where you engage with the public. What subjects scientists considered appropriate for public debate was shaped by their conception of the public, what its competencies and responsibilities were.
The Norton Zinder Collection at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Archives offers an excellent window into this set of questions. Zinder was heavily involved in public controversies about recombinant DNA and genetic engineering in the 1970s and 1980s. He also had the reputation of being an excellent communicator with the public. This reputation suggests several additional and related questions — was that reputation justified? What does it mean for a scientist to be considered a good public communicator, and who makes the judgement calls about the quality of communication?
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In his consideration of “scientists and the public,” Zinder noted at one point that “on most issues it is relatively easy to find the relevant scientific community, even its dissidents.” 10 Although statement had a lot of qualifiers — most, relatively, even — it was true that the “scientific community” was in some ways easier to pin down than “the public.” There were particular organizations, publications and fora that specialists and nonspecialists alike could address with a reasonable expectation of reaching the audience they wished to reach. For example, Norton Zinder’s “Ha-ha” file of odds and ends he found funny contained a letter and flier from a Los Angeles psychologist determined to raise public awareness of what he saw as the apocalyptic dangers of recombinant DNA research. The letter was addressed to the president of the National Academy of Sciences.11 Even though the chances of this particular communication getting much of a hearing at the NAS were slim, it made sense to send it to this organization. The NAS was one of the places to which scientists in the days before the internet directed communications that would be of interest to the entire scientific community. In the summer of 1973, for example, when news of Herbert Boyer and Stanley Cohen’s development of a technique to combine DNA from different sources — recombinant DNA — began to spread among attendees of the Gordon Conference on Nucleic Acids, the conference’s organizers, Maxine Singer and Dieter Söll, also wrote to the president of the NAS to request that the NAS set up a committee to discuss a plan of action, including guidelines for research.12 Their letter was later published in Science in September of 1973.13 Science, along with Nature, were key forums of communication among scientists. The famous “Berg letter,” signed by Paul Berg and a long list of colleagues, in which they called for a moratorium on recombinant DNA research until the risks were better known, was published in Science in 1974.14 The point here is that although “the scientific community” might be more complex as a concept than it first appears, there were at least established channels for communicating with it —one could be fairly sure that a letter in Science or a communication via the National Academy of Science would reach the public that it was intended to reach.
This did not mean that communication within this community always operated smoothly. Biochemist Erwin Chargaff was notoriously opposed to proceeding with recombinant DNA research and said as much in a letter published in Science in 1976. This letter is significant because the responses to it reveal a number of the assumptions and ground rules that were assumed in public communication among scientists. Chargaff alleged that those in favor of moving forward with recombinant DNA research were motivated by arrogance and idle curiosity and implied that they were too blinded by these unscientific emotions to respond appropriately to criticism: he claimed that when anyone raised questions about what practical benefits would arise from the research and how, the response was “screams and empty promises.” He charged his colleagues with having considered neither the ethical implications of the research nor the biological risks, and brought up the specter of genetically altered E. coli bacterial infecting people and the dangers that might arise through the careless mingling of prokaryotic and eukaryotic DNA. The letter implies that recombinant DNA researchers were attempting to pull off an epoch-making scam at humanity’s and nature’s expense — that they were attempting to swindle the public into accepting dangerous science with few to no public benefits.15 The tone of the letter was such that it was less an argument about science than a personal attack on those who wanted to carry out recombinant DNA research. Writing a decade later about Chargaff’s statements in a discussion of the media’s role in the controversy, Norton Zinder noted that Chargaff’s rhetorical questions were “not designed to be answered” and were “loaded with assumptions and allegations,” such that they were less questions and statements than “a set of tonal allegations.”16
Maxine Singer and Paul Berg’s public response to Chargaff’s letter, also printed in Science, took a tone pointedly different from the original. Their letter addresses Chargaff’s objections in a way that implies that he has failed to do his homework or even that he is attempting to mislead his readers. For example, they argue that issues Chargaff claims have been ignored in the debate about recombinant DNA have actually been discussed “in considerable detail,” and that had he “examined the massive and readily available” documentation on the subject, he would have known that. They imply he has, intentionally or not, mischaracterized the discussions that led to the rDNA guidelines by claiming incorrectly that they were directed at “balancing benefits and risks” rather than “eliminating or minimizing real or imagined hazards.” His argument about the dangers of E. coli is described as “misleading,” for quite specific reasons — the E. coli used in such experiments is a different strain than that found in humans and in addition would be rendered “unable to live in natural environments” before being used in any experiments. The letter implies that Chargaff might not have thoroughly informed himself or understood the nature of the proposed experiments, given that he had implied that all recombinant DNA experiments create “new” life forms, which they do not. But their sharpest criticism of his letter is directed at his attitude towards his fellow scientists and science itself. In addition to arguing that recommended safety procedures were not mere “smokescreens” — that is, scientists were not tricking the public to get on with their research — they conclude by stating that they “are deeply disturbed by the distortions, derision, and pessimism that permeate Chargaff’s comments. He appears to see science as a curse on our time, and men as feeble.”17 The way Singer and Berg present their response to Chargaff’s objections is significant because it sets up a question. Here are two prominent scientists reacting to a biting critique of rDNA research from one of their own. Do scientists tend to react differently, or respond differently, when similarly strongly worded critiques come from outside the scientific community, and what does the difference tell us about how scientists imagined the public or conceived of communication with it?
One question in particular recurs throughout the entire conversation: did anyone understand this research? Chargaff implied that those who were engaging in it hadn’t thought through what they were doing on an ethical or philosophical level. Singer and Berg suggested that Chargaff hadn’t done his homework and thus didn’t fully understand the scientific or policy details connected to recombinant DNA research — and they also implied that he might mislead others. The potential consequences of a faulty or incomplete understanding of what this research was about runs through the debate in the 1970s and 80s over recombinant DNA and genetic engineering. In particular, as we’ll see below, scientists feared the potential consequences of the public not understanding their research. Moreover, they tended to explain public criticism of or objections to scientific research in terms of ‘not understanding the science,’ which reveals a lot about how they conceived of the public.
To address this perceived information gap, scientists had to seek out the public — but that was easier said than done. Some specialized publics were easy to find. For example, there were professional organizations — as mentioned above, Zinder gave a talk about genetic engineering to the American Bar Association in 1978. Scientists could and did give public talks aimed at general audiences, although the public reached in this case was necessarily limited. There were also publics as represented by state and national legislative bodies, which will be addressed in detail below. Perhaps most importantly, though, there was the press — journalists with varying levels of background knowledge and varying points of view about science, magazine writers and editors, the producers of radio and television news. Scientists’ relationship with this professional group was complicated. They were collaborators, in a sense, since there was a shared goal of communication, but scientists also mistrusted what they saw as a journalistic tendency to oversimplify and sensationalize. The questions of how this relationship worked, and when it tended to break down, are worth going into in more detail.
The fear that any information scientists might provide about genetic research would be blown up by the press in a way that misled and frightened the public was a theme in discussions about genetics even before recombinant DNA technology was developed. In 1966, during a private meeting held at Rockefeller University to discuss potential “genetic intervention in humans,” the scientists who participated decided that there would be “there be no publication of the discussion nor an official report.” They had too little concrete information, for one thing, and there was also the fear of creating a media circus: “this area is so highly charged that no matter how carefully everything is said, it gets overplayed and overinterpreted.”18 The implication here was that despite scientists’ best efforts, their statements would be distorted or misunderstood. Was the problem journalists, or the general public itself? Could the public be trusted to understand complex information and react appropriately (however one defines ‘appropriately,’ which we’ll get to later) and not panic? Could journalists be relied upon to resist the siren song of sensationalism?
Norton Zinder and New York Times science correspondent Harold Schmeck, Jr. both had an opportunity to reflect on the role of the media during the controversy, in a book published in 1986, after the dust had settled. Looking back, Zinder thought that “with a few notable exceptions, the texts of the news stories — and the editorials in the major newspapers and magazines — were as balanced as one might expect for so complicated and volatile an issue.” There were the typical sensationalist pieces that you might expect from sources such as The National Enquirer, the impact of which was difficult to judge. Many of the problems, Zinder’s analysis implied, came from journalists, as laypeople, not knowing how to read the issue or describe conflict among scientists. “They had some trouble in deciding who were the good guys and who were the bad guys among the credible scientists.” Since sweeping apocalyptic claims are easy to make and get spread quickly, while refutations tend to be more detailed and less attention-grabbing, journalists sometimes ended up “disseminating outrageous statements.” What is now sometimes referred to as “bothsidesism” also played a role, in that the press did not always accurately represent the extent to which opposition among scientists to recombinant DNA was the opinion of a very small minority.19
Zinder also made a claim about the relation of scientists, journalists and laypeople that was, first of all, more debatable than he probably thought, and second, revelatory of how he thought of the relationship between scientists and non-scientists when it came to communication: “The media’s major failure lay in their inability to explain to the public that recombinant DNA is just shorthand for the technique of splicing together DNA molecules. Techniques are neutral…at issue was the kind of molecules spliced together and the uses to which they were put,” and failure to clarify this meant that both unobjectionable and objectionable potential experiments were lumped together. “Had the media made clear that the majority of the experiments were agreed by all to be safe, we might sooner have gotten to the point of negotiating price, not mythic principle.”20 The critics of the ‘Asilomar mode’ of conceptualizing risk management and communication between scientists and the public mentioned above would draw attention here to Zinder’s assertion that techniques are neutral. This was in fact one of the points at issue in the debate, whether it was ethical to cut and splice genetic material from different species in this way, i.e. whether the technique itself was acceptable, regardless of specifically what experiments were carried out. Zinder had automatically placed this point out of the bounds of debate; as a scientist, he assumed that he was in a position to do this. (This is not to say he was wrong to make this assumption, merely that it was not as undisputed at the time as his formulation implied.) The phrase “had the media made clear” is also telling. Zinder’s model of communication here was that once scientists had determined how to calculate risks and made the call on the safety of a technique, the role of the press was to “make clear,” i.e. deliver the scientists’ information to the public, who would receive it, accept it and proceed to act based on it.21
Finally, Zinder made an interesting point about the relationship between scientists and journalists when he discussed getting access to the press as a scientist. He wrote that although NYT correspondent Harold Schmeck claimed that various parties in the controversy were attempting to use the press to their own advantage, when he, Zinder, actually tried to “impose” on a reporter or two to cover a specific story, he was unsuccessful. Indeed, at several points in the 1970s he had been “desperate for lack of access to the media.”22 This is important because it suggests “the media,” that is, media that are not scientific publications like Science or Nature, are an important point of access to the public for scientists — that that interface with the public was sometimes hard to get to, and they needed help, i.e. journalists.
Schmeck, for his part, coincided with Zinder in some things — they both noted that “the press” was not a monolith — but had a different perspective on others. In particular, he saw the press as having a more active role in the process of communication than Zinder assumed: “providing the necessary information to the public…cannot be left entirely to the scientists, nor to the pressure groups” that had formed on various sides of the controversy. Put another way, this meant that the press had an expertise here that was distinct from the expertise of scientists. This included journalists’ obligation to report views that they might know, or suspect, to be factually incorrect, because the expression of these views was part of the story. Schmeck stated that the choice to report on such views or not was complicated, as was the question of how to accurately represent what percentage of scientists took one position or another — “and the cautious approach of playing it down the middle by quoting equally from both extremes is not necessarily a safeguard.” (Certainly not, one can almost hear Zinder snort.) 23
On the other hand, in some ways the press had less control than one might think. Schmeck argued that the press didn’t create the recombinant DNA controversy. A significant part of the hype was related to the fact that the issue appeared relatively suddenly in the news, which gave the false impression that there was a significant threat. In terms of the response, Schmeck though that the polarization was already there. It was true that the press probably did “contribute to distorted views of recombinant DNA technology on the part of some readers and viewers,” although that was not their intention and they tried expressly to avoid doing this. In addition to this, what the public absorbed from media coverage of the controversy wasn’t always what journalists intended. Here Schmeck instanced television news, where scenes of shouting and sign-waving could “appear to be the whole story, and not necessarily through any fault of those responsible for the newscast.”24
Schmeck’s discussion of scientists and what they might have learned from the controversy emphasizes how the press’s attitude toward scientists also plays a role in how scientific communication functions. There were fads in journalism, he wrote, just like in any other profession, and there were points in history when scientists’ words were “taken as gospel,” and times when they were seen as suspect. He voiced some mild criticism of professional scientists, expressing the hope that they had “learned some valuable lessons from the controversy,” such as that “lay people can learn about such esoteric matters as recombinant DNA and molecular biology and that they are capable of making rational judgements on the basis of facts.” Scientists, Schmeck was implying had perhaps underestimated the lay public’s ability to understand complex ideas — the public that scientists imagined required more spoon-feeding than was actually the case. Indeed, scientists might have been imagining a more passive and docile public than the one they actually confronted. Schmeck expressed concern that the entire experience might make scientists retreat from communicating with the public about complex topics, since it could be “that the scientists who took the extraordinarily responsible step of voicing their concerns will have judged that they reaped not public understanding and appreciation, but the whirlwind,” and they might “vow never to do that again, but keep the controversies of science safely sealed off in the world of science itself.”25
What can we say so far about this three-sided relationship between scientists, members of the press, and the general public? In the 1970s and 80s, the press played a crucial role in nearly any attempt by scientists to connect to the public. The public that they had access to was the newspaper and magazine-reading public, as well as radio listeners and television viewers. Many of the communication challenges arose from the nature of this type of communication — sensationalism sold newspapers and magazines, and even journalists with the best of intentions did not always have control over how their material was presented. As always, it was far easier to make dramatic or terrifying claims than it was to refute them. Neither the press nor scientists could always predict what the public would take away from a given story or broadcast. Scientists and journalists also sometimes found themselves at cross purposes, in the sense that researchers like Zinder often assumed that the role of the press was to transmit to the public what they, the scientists, wanted to communicate, while reporters saw the relationship as slightly more adversarial — their contribution consisted in asking scientists uncomfortable questions and getting to the parts of the story that researchers might not want to talk about. Yet both ultimately saw themselves as doing the right thing as far as the general public was concerned. Hanging in the air was the question of what “the public” actually needed — did ordinary people simply need appropriately formulated scientific information, or did they need champions, in the form of journalists, who would both dig up the information they ought to have and also, occasionally, scare them into paying attention to particular issues? Could the public be trusted to understand what they needed to understand, or to determine for themselves what that might be?
In the context of Zinder’s and Schmeck’s comments about journalism and the recombinant DNA debate, the public is mostly imagined as a receiver (occasionally a slightly defective receiver) of information. But there was another part of the long public controversy that made the general public into an umpire. This happened when scientists debated one another, or debated non-specialists, with the general public expressly imagined as the audience. This was different from things like the exchange between Singer and Berg and Chargaff in the pages of Science, because while laypeople could and did read Nature or Science, these are publications with a specialized audience, aimed at professional scientists, science journalists and other readers with an interest and/or background in science.
The uproar surrounding Jeremy Rifkin’s crusade against recombinant DNA technology is a good example of this type of public debate. In the 1980s, Rifkin gained the reputation in some circles as an important critic of the excesses of modern science, particularly genetic engineering and biotechnology. His 1983 book Algeny offered a critique of biotechnology based on a model of the relationship between science and culture that was not tightly moored to historical or sociological evidence, paired with a shaky grasp of evolutionary theory. Reviewers with backgrounds in the sciences and the history of science were not slow to point this out.26 To this Stephen J. Gould offered a scathing critique of Rifkin’s scholarship and intellectual honesty.27 (Rifkin himself would probably have admitted that his methods of argumentation were not always watertight, since his goal was to get and hold the public’s attention rather than offer a nuanced discussion of all the details.28) But the book was nevertheless highly influential. One of the less critical reviews of it suggests why. To readers who might not have realized that there was reason to be concerned about the evidentiary basis for Rifkin’s claims about the mechanics of evolution or the relationship between science and society, the takeaway message of the book was something along the lines of: the possibilities offered by biotechnology are radically changing our relationship to ourselves and the environment and it would be a good idea if we were more concerned about this.29 Even Gould found Rifkin’s concern about the “integrity of nature” legitimate.30 That the book found a broad audience, in other words, is not surprising.
Laypeople influenced by Rifkin entered the debate about genetic engineering, and the more prominent among them did so in fora that reached a broad audience. One contribution in particular, a piece in the “Viewpoints” section of the Long Island newspaper Newsday in 1983, moved Zinder to respond. The piece was a critic of genetic engineering written by Jeremy Rifkin as a preface to a resolution against genetic engineering signed by a long list of religious leaders.31 Zinder published a response to it not long afterward, also in Newsday, which achieved significant recognition among his colleagues. His correspondence also makes reference to an article on the same subjects, perhaps a reprint of the Newsday piece, in Reform Judaism.32 Zinder’s correspondence around this date with Paul Berg, David Baltimore and others and others reveals that Zinder and his colleagues saw Rifkin as primarily responsible for what they considered scientifically unfounded and ethically questionable scaremongering. One correspondent, Ronald Cape of the biotechnology company Cetus, called the Reform Judaism piece “excellent” and added that he was “appalled to see the previous story and coverage given to Jeremy Rifkin. I think your article exhibited enormous self control. That this publication should have been duped as were all these clergymen in the spring is disgusting.”33
That Zinder published in Newsday and Reform Judaism suggests how he thought he could best locate and address the relevant publics, via newspapers with a broad audience and religious publications read by laypeople with an interest in moral and ethical questions. Zinder’s Newsday piece was specifically a response to the assertion that humans did not have the right to decide which genes were passed on from generation to generation. He argued in response that first of all, we do this all the time already, for example by developing treatments for genetically transmitted conditions like sickle cell anemia and phenylketonuria that allow people with those conditions to survive and reproduce. Zinder also noted that compared to the effect of normal human migration and reproduction on the gene pool, the effects of present-day (early 1980s) genetic technology were minimal. Finally, he argued that gene therapy, if carried out with thorough consideration of all the moral and ethical considerations, would relieve suffering in many people — and could be done without affecting the genes they might pass down to their offspring. Perhaps the most interesting moment in the piece was when Zinder asked why it was that “genetic manipulation” was raising such a “hue and cry.” He thought it was because “it touches on what we feel to be ‘essence’” and thus “creates a psychological fear in many people.” Zinder’s conception of and approach to the public is evident here — he uses the word “we” to legitimate what he thinks their concern is, that genetic engineering involves tinkering with “what we feel to be essence,” and then pivots to reassurance, arguing very practically that giving up the chance for medical benefits that are feasible within the near future because of nightmare scenarios further down the road doesn’t make sense. He also noted that theologians, ethicists and others had already examined these questions and that there was a morally sound way forward, if appropriate precautions were taken. To the argument that scientists were attempting to play god, Zinder responded that this was arrogant and presumptuous: how could a human being do something supernatural, as any intervention by God in nature must necessarily be?34
The public debate spurred on by Rifkin’s Algeny book (and his activism in general) in the early 1980s shows scientists’ frustrations at how others, in their view, both gained and misused access to the public. The problem with being able to locate and address the public via newspapers, magazines or books was that others could also address the public in this way, and ultimately Zinder, or Berg, or Gould, had no way to ensure that they were taken more seriously than Rifkin or the group of concerned clergymen lined up behind him.
Perhaps the most formal point of interface between scientists and the public was the legislature. Members of state assemblies and Congress were and are described as representatives of the people — but did that mean in a practical sense that to address the legislature was to address “the public”? Legislatures and legislators often had their own procedures and agendas that were as unfamiliar to the general public that they represented as they were to the scientists who lobbied or advised them — and who were also, of course, part of that general public represented in the legislature.35
Zinder at one point said that he thought that “we have to consider the public to be our legislators,” i.e. that for all practical purposes, legislators were the public they had to address in order to address “the public” in general. But interacting with legislators brought a series of challenges that made communication about scientific research difficult. The first of these had to do with access. Zinder found it frustrating that legislators were willing to opine in public about recombinant DNA without knowing what DNA was in the first place — and yet when scientists invited state or national representatives (or their aides) to visit their labs and learn about the science that was the potential subject of legislation, there was no interest.36 Burke Zimmerman, a fellow scientists with experience working with legislators, remarked on this as well, noting that without some kind of imminent looming crisis to address, something that generated a lot of publicity and concern from constituents, getting legislators to pay attention to what they saw as arcane scientific topics was difficult.37
Zinder’s model of what he saw as the ideal conversation with legislators about science assumed an intellectual curiosity on the part of legislators that might well have been wishful thinking, as well as a willingness to learn as long as there was no public exposure of ignorance:
you meet in a small seminar room with some coffee or some whiskey — depending on the time of day — and you let your hair down — off the record — exchanging views on these complicated technical problems. I don’t expect a congressman or a governor to understand what DNA is. But I do object when a governor comes to a hearing of the Senate and makes a speech in which he says he wants to ban recombinant DNA research in his state” and doesn’t know what DNA is. “What we need is a forum where we can sit down and explain to the governor or anyone else what we have to say. He can sit down and listen and ask, and not be afraid to be publicly exposed as not knowing the answer.38
As with other interactions with the public, Zinder’s model assumed that it was about scientists providing explanations to a public that was, all other things being equal, interested in hearing them. In addition, Zinder’s assumption continued to be that scientists set the framework for the conversation, that they knew what everyone else needed to know.
This, in fact, pointed to the major downside of considering legislators as the point of interface with the public. When scientists interacted with members of congress or testified before legislative bodies, the encountered some of the same problems as they did when addressing, say, readers of Newsday who had also read Jeremy Rifkin’s book — lack of technical knowledge, which meant that their process of making decisions or judgements about it was necessarily different from that of professional scientists. They also encountered some additional problems, such as that the professional demands placed on legislators gave them little incentive or time for basic curiosity. Making judgements about scientific questions, such as the safety of recombinant DNA research, was just not what legislatures were set up to do.39
What does all of this tell us about the process of scientists attempting to find and talk to, or with, the public about recombinant DNA in the 1970s and 1980s? On the one hand, the scientific communication problem as Norton Zinder and his contemporaries confronted it was qualitatively different than the one faced by scientists today. Without websites, blogs or Twitter, scientists then were dependent on traditional media if they wanted to address the general public. And communication via traditional media like magazines, radio or television was one way — the information flowed to the viewer or reader, and the possibilities of response and dialog were limited. This reinforced the assumption made by many scientists that scientific communication with the public was mostly a matter of explaining things.
At the same time, many of the concerns about where you find “the public” and how you communicate with them have not changed fundamentally in the last forty years. Neither have related questions about the role of expertise in debates about science. It’s far easier for lay people to access scientific information now than it was then, but it’s also far easier to access and spread misinformation. As a lay person, it’s quite easy to convince yourself you are an expert on, say, genetic engineering, or vaccines, and many scientists have expressed intense frustration with the havoc this plays in terms of discussions of new research, the ethical questions surrounding new discoveries, or even public health. The problem of scientists’ own blind spots, or the limits of their expertise when it comes to ethical questions or determination of risks, is also a perennial issue.
What, then, makes a scientist a good public communicator? Is it the ability to explain complex information in a way that is accurate but comprehensible to someone without extensive knowledge of the subject? Is it the desire to do this in the first place? Zinder’s public communications contain a lot of pithy summations and witty rejoinders, and he was clearly motivated to talk with the public about research and, in particular, to dismantle misconceptions about what recombinant DNA was, and the possibilities and dangers of genetic engineering. Whether he succeeded or not — whether anyone could have succeeded at this task — is another question.
Notes
1 Scholars have noted that the idea that there is “science” or “scientists” on the one hand and “the public” on the other — two homogenous and distinct camps — is not always accurate and can be misleading. In fact, the debate over recombinant DNA in the 1970s may have been key in creating and solidifying ideas about what these two terms meant. Priska Gisler and Monica Kurath, “Paradise lost? ‘Science’ and ‘the public’ after Asilomar, Science, Technology & Human Values 36, 2 (March 2011): 213-243.
2 Norton Zinder Collection, Series: Rockefeller, Box 8, Folder: Rock Students, Zinder to Clifford D. Stromberg, July 21, 1978.
3 J. A. Osmundsen, Norton Zinder and David Callahan, “Zinder vs. Callahan,” Politics Today 5, 4 (July-Aug 1978): 16-17. Emphasis in original.
4 Geisler and Kurath, 224-227.
5 Gregorowius, Daniel et al., “The role of scientific self-regulation for the control of genome editing in the human germine: the lessons from the Asilomar and the Napa meetings,” EMBO Reports 18, 3 (2017): 355-358.
6 Marcia Barinaga, “Asilomar revisited: lessons for today?” Science 287, no. 5458 (March 3, 2000): 1585
7 Susan Wright, “Molecular biology or molecular politics? The production of scientific consensus on the hazards of recombinant DNA technology,” Social Studies of Science 16, 4 (November 1986): 593-620, and Molecular Politics: Developing American and British Regulatory Policy for Genetic Engineering, 1972-1982 (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1994).
8 Brian Wynne, “Creating public alienation: expert cultures of risk and ethics on GMOs,” Science as Culture 10, 4 (2001): 445-481.
9 J. Benjamin Hurlbut, “Limits of responsibility: genome editing, Asilomar and the politics of deliberation,” Hastings Center Report 45, 5 (2015): 11–14; J. Benjamin Hurlbut, “Remembering the future: science, law and the legacy of Asilomar,” in Sheila Jasanoff and Sang-Hyun Kim, eds., Dreamscapes of Modernity: Sociotechnical Imaginaries and the Fabrication of Power (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 126-151; Taylor, Cynthia and Dewsbury, Brian, “Barriers to Inclusive Deliberation and Democratic Governance of Genetic Technologies at the Science-Policy Interface,” Journal of Science Communication 18, no. 3 (June 14, 2019), https://doi.org/10.22323/2.18030402. See also Shobita Parthasarathy, “Governance lessons for CRISPR/Cas9 from the missed opportunities of Asilomar,” Ethics in Biology, Engineering & Medicine 6, 3-4 (2015): 305-312; Sheila Jasanoff, “In the democracies of DNA: ontological uncertainty and political order in three states,” New Genetics and Society 24, 2 (2005): 139-156.
10 NZC, Series: Rockefeller, Box 8, Folder: Rock Students, Zinder to Clifford D. Stromberg, July 21, 1978.
11 NZC, Series: Rockefeller, Box 29, Folder: Ha-ha file, Dr. L. Douglas DeNike to Dr. Philip Handler [President of the NAS], July 24, 1976.
12 Letter available via NIH here
13 Maxine Singer and Dieter Söll, “Guidelines for Hybrid DNA Molecules,” Science 181, No. 4105 (Sept. 21, 1973): 1114.
14 Paul Berg et al., “Potential biohazards of recombinant DNA molecules,” Science 185, no. 4148 (July 26, 1974): 303.
15 Erwin Chargaff, “On the dangers of genetic meddling,” Science 192, no. 4243 (June 4, 1976): 938, 940.
16 Norton Zinder, “A personal view of the media’s role in the recombinant DNA War,” in Raymond A. Zilinskas and Burke K. Zimmerman, eds., The Gene-Splicing Wars: Reflections on the Recombinant DNA Controversy (New York: Macmillan, 1986), 116.
17 Maxine Singer and Paul Berg, “Recombinant DNA: NIH Guidelines,” Science 193, no. 4249 (July 16, 1976): 186-188.
18 NZC, Series: Rockefeller, Box 26, Folder: Unlabeled, “Summary of Meeting Held October 1, 1966 at the Rockefeller University,” 8.
19 Norton Zinder, “A personal view of the media’s role in the recombinant DNA war,” in Zilinskas and Zimmerman, The Gene-Splicing Wars, 109, 114.
20 Norton Zinder, “A personal view of the media’s role in the recombinant DNA war,” in Zilinskas and Zimmerman, The Gene-Splicing Wars, 117.
21 Norton Zinder, “A personal view of the media’s role in the recombinant DNA war,” in Zilinskas and Zimmerman, The Gene-Splicing Wars, 117.
22 Norton Zinder, “A personal view of the media’s role in the recombinant DNA war,” in Zilinskas and Zimmerman, The Gene-Splicing Wars, 112-114.
23 Harold Schmeck, “Recombinant DNA controversy: the right to know — and to worry,” in Zilinskas and Zimmerman, The Gene-Splicing Wars, 94, 100.
24 Harold Schmeck, “Recombinant DNA controversy,” in Zilinskas and Zimmerman, The Gene-Splicing Wars, 94-96, 102, 101.
25 Harold Schmeck, “Recombinant DNA controversy,” in Zilinskas and Zimmerman, The Gene-Splicing Wars, 104-105.
26 Jeremy Rifkin, Algeny (New York: Viking, 1983); R. J. Hilbelink, Review of Algeny and Declaration of a Heretic by Jeremy Rifkin, Politics and the Life Sciences 5, 2 (Feb. 1987): 285-287; John Buettner-Janusch, Review of Algeny, American Anthropologist 86, 3 (Sept. 1984): 745-756.
27 Stephen J. Gould, “Integrity and Mr. Rifkin,” in An Urchin in the Storm: Essays about Books and Ideas (New York: Norton, 1987), 229-239.
28 Dick Thompson, “The most hated man in science,” Time Dec. 4, 1989.
29 Grady Wells, Review of Algeny, Umoja Sasa 7, 5 (Winter 1983): 59-60.
30 Gould, “Integrity and Mr. Rifkin,” 239.
31 Jeremy Rifkin, “The Moral Danger of Genetic Engineering,” Newsday, June 8, 1983, p. 57.
32 Bernard D. Davis wrote to Zinder asking for a copy of the Newsday piece, NZC Series: Rockefeller, Box 2, Folder: unlabeled, B.D. Davis to Zinder, Jan. 26. 1984; another colleague congratulates him on the Reform Judaism piece, Series: Rockefeller, Box 2, Folder: Unlabeled, Eugene H. Kone to Zinder, Dec. 12, 1983.
33 Zinder, Series: Rockefeller, Box 2, Folder Unlabeled, Ronald E. Cape [from Cetus] to Zinder, December 8, 1988?; Paul Berg to Zinder, July 26, 1983; David Baltimore to Zinder, August 4, 1983.
34 Zinder, “The Case for Genetic Engineering,” Newsday July 14, 1983, p. 63, via Proquest Historical Newspapers.
35 For an insider’s perspective on recombinant DNA legislation in the 1970s, see Burke C. Zimmerman, “Science and politics: DNA goes to Washington,” in Zilinskas & Zimmerman, The Gene Splicing Wars, 33-53.
36 J. A. Osmundsen, Norton Zinder and David Callahan, “Zinder vs. Callahan,” Politics Today 5, 4 (July-August 1978): 14-19.
37 Burke Zimmerman, “Science and politics,” 46-47.
38 J. A. Osmundsen, Norton Zinder and David Callahan, “Zinder vs. Callahan,” Politics Today 5, 4 (July-August 1978): 18.
39 Burke Zimmerman, “Science and politics,” 42.